Word: bellowings
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...social realism that flourished in depression was exhausted by prosperity. In the ensuing decades. Chicago's backwaters were described in livelier manner by Nelson Algren and Saul Bellow. Farrell gradually dropped out of sight, his books published but ignored by critics and readers who had moved on to other themes, higher styles. The old pro stayed on his outworn turf producing characters who still dumbly battled circumstance, like cuttlefish trying to redirect the tide. Olive and Mary Anne is the fixture as before. Its five tales are confined to the standard Farrell inventory: lives with insufficient love, the sorrows...
...book spans roughly 20 years: from the '50s, when an author's "sensibility" was all, to the '60s and '70s, when private ironies and quiet implosions of emotion gave way to a journalistic relevance. In current fiction that usually means female counterparts of Saul Bellow's Dangling Man. The crucial difference is that today most heroines seem free of the need to huff and puff about the Big Questions: the loss of tradition, unpardonable guilt, the death of God. They certainly never ponder man's fate...
When Saul Bellow wrote his roman a clef, Humboldt's Gift, even knowledgeable readers had trouble recalling the model for Von Humboldt Fleisher. The difficulty would not have occurred if Bellow's chief character had been based on Robert Lowell or John Berry man or Theodore Roethke. Yet, for these celebrated poets, Delmore Schwartz was once the front runner of their generation...
SOLICITING STRONG SCHOLAR to head top university. Boasts 42 Nobel prizewinners, including Faculty Members Saul Bellow and Milton Friedman; achievements range from development of nuclear fission to compiling a 21-volume Assyrian dictionary. The 2,500 undergraduates (2 to 1 male) are studious and competitive, as are the 5,500 graduate students in the professional schools and graduate courses. New president must be adroit manager. Under Incumbent John Wilson, retiring soon at 65, university balanced $255 million budget by trimming faculty slightly and raising tuition; but drive to increase $272 million endowment lags. Salary modest (low $40,000 range...
Writing anything about that year is a challenge, and Kramer, Bellow and friends confront this challenge with class and cleverness, providing the necessary comedy to keep everything in perspective. It is a very funny play, and it was a very funny year. And like Tim, Stan, Marcie, JC, Sue, Maggi and Jock, you can take some time to look in the mirror and laugh at yourself and say, "Sanity is such a burden...